Hidden System Option Greyed Out

[Brian Duda]

Hello,

I want to create a hidden system partition. I have a 5TB HDD formatted as
NTFS with a 250GB partition with Windows 10 installed. When booting from the
Windows installation, I run veracrypt and I am allowed to do "normal" which
is system partition encryption, but "Hidden" is greyed out. What are the
requirements for a hidden system partition which I may not be aware of?

Thank you.

Brian

[Enigma2Illusion]

Hello Brian,

The documentation explains the requirements.

https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/VeraCrypt%20Hidden%20Operating%20System.html

https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Plausible%20Deniability.html

[Brian Duda]

The only requirements I can find are:
1. Must be a suitable partition on the system drive found immediately behind the system drive
2. Suitable partition means 5% larger than the system partition for fat32 or 110% larger for NTFS

I'm using a smaller HDD right now for testing purposes. Screenshot of drive parititons provided.

Is there some other requirement I could be missing?

[Brian Duda]

Ok, I managed to stumble upon the release notes and found:
"Support EFI Windows system encryption (limitations: no hidden os, no boot custom message)"

So legacy mode set in the bios, no problem. Create hidden system became available.

I ran across the issue of being unable to proceed further due to windows 10 creating the system reserved partition (system not on the first partition) but that issue was easy to resolve by going back to the windows install and running a command prompt to make full partitions of the drive prior to installation so that windows wouldn't be able to make the reserved partition.

I think both of these requirements should be added to the instructions for making a hidden system so that users are aware in advance. It would even be worth a sentence to state that the 2 partitions should be created prior to installing windows so that windows won't create additional partitions automatically. And in the case of the hidden system wizard being greyed out, it would be ideal if the software gave the reason why.